Eugene Robinson: Profiling a seductive idea for some, but it would not work.

By Eugene Robinson :
November 23, 2010

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It's hard to love the Transportation Security Administration, especially now that airport personnel seem so intent on touching people's junk. But the TSA's job isn't to be adorable, it's to be infallible - and also, apparently, to suffer being unfairly maligned.

Sure, the "don't touch my junk" guy touched a nerve. I spend enough time fighting my way through airport security lines to share his frustration at ever-changing procedures that seem capricious, intrusive and sometimes just bizarre. But what is the alternative?

Last Christmas, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to bring down an airliner by detonating explosives concealed in his underwear. The device did not properly explode, but the incident sensitized the TSA to the danger of terrorist bombs that might make it past a metal detector - hence the rush to install full-body scanners that give a clear view of what's beneath a person's clothing, junk and all.

An unacceptable, un-American invasion of privacy? That's not what critics were saying at the time. If there was technology that could have detected the device, critics asked, why hadn't it been in place?

So now the scanners are being installed - and some people complain that they do too good a job, clear-picture-wise. The TSA's response is to give travelers the option of submitting to a manual search that is comparably thorough. It would defeat the whole purpose of the machines if people could just say "no thanks" and then undergo a cursory search that might leave a device like the underwear bomb undiscovered.

Is all of this really necessary? That depends on how safe we want to be, or rather how safe we want to feel.

The device that Abdulmutallab was wearing is believed to have been designed and built by Osama bin Laden's affiliate organization in Yemen, called al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP. This group has been increasingly active and makes no secret of its continuing desire to blow U.S. airliners out of the sky.

In other words, these AQAP people are resourceful and determined. Now, we could decide that treating air-traveling Americans like Guantanamo inmates is going too far - that by doing so, we invest a bunch of terrorists with power they do not deserve. That might make sense, but we'd have to understand the consequences.

For any individual, the chance of being killed or injured in a terrorist attack would still be infinitesimal. But the chance that AQAP or other terrorist group eventually downs an aircraft would greatly increase.

We have not decided to put this in the category of acceptable risks. The economic and psychological damage from terrorist attacks is so great that we have resolved to prevent them. This is what we ask the TSA to do.

What the critics really mean is not that the TSA should let underwear bombers board planes. What they're saying is: Don't search me, and don't search my grandmother. Just search the potential terrorists.

In other words, they want profiling. But it couldn't possibly work. Our terrorist enemies are not stupid.

If we only search people who "look like terrorists," al-Qaida will send people who don't fit the profile. It's no accident that most of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were from Saudi Arabia; at the time, it was easier for Saudi nationals to get U.S. visas than it was for citizens of other Arab countries. Eventually terrorists will find a suicide bomber who looks just like you, me or Granny.